GenAI is actually capable of generating one original idea: It’s the idea of a world where it’s suddenly impossible to buy RAM or graphics cards, and where consoles go up in price after six years instead of down, and you can’t buy a flagship phone for under $1,000, and the burgeoning future of handheld PCs has been cut off at the knees, and the global economy is currently balanced on the precarious stupidity of three or four corporations paying each other that same trillion dollars. It’s also a reality in which enterprising criminals are making a fortune by swapping out the graphics cards of esports PCs with crappier versions, then selling their loot online. (Thanks VideoCardz, via IGN.)
Two Chinese men came up with a very cunning plan. China enjoys the phenomenon of esports hotels—rooms that come with a gaming PC and a healthy internet connection—and these two chaps figured out that the cost of a night’s stay was an awful lot less than the price of the GeForce RTX 5080s (around $1,700) that were inside the room’s PCs. But rather than obviously gutting the machines and doing a runner, their plan was smarter. They checked into the hotel rooms with a couple of RTX 3060 cards (around $300) in their baggage, and swapped these into the machines, removing the far more powerful and expensive alternatives. The PCs still looked intact—one fan-laden slab of GPU looks much like another at a glance, after all—and so, they hoped, it’d be the perfect crime. And it almost was!
As in every cautionary tale, the thieves couldn’t resist pulling the con one too many times. During one visit to an esports hotel they’d previously hit, their room lost power, which the police suggest was a result of their tampering. Rather brazenly, they called down to the front desk and asked to be moved to a new room, but in doing so they met their match. An electrician visited the room they’d vacated and noticed “pry marks” on the cabinets in which the PCs were locked, so staff checked another room they knew the pair had stayed at and checked the PCs there, too. And thereupon discovered that the machines contained RTX 3060s instead of 5080s.
Wuhan police were able to match the thieves to up to four different cases in the area in which the pair had stolen just shy of 80,000 yuan, or almost $12,000, worth of GPUs. They were apparently then going on to sell them for half their value online. It’s intriguing to realize that they weren’t caught because later guests at the hotel discovered their PCs weren’t running games to a high enough standard. In fact, according to the police report, at least one hotel manager was bemused to see the police arriving and said that “the guests haven’t reported any problems.” (You don’t need to upgrade your GPU as much as the companies want you to think.)
Both were arrested July 20, and were then seemingly photographed in handcuffs with the evidence, which is weird. By August 5, the graphics cards were returned to the hotel managers, where we’re told by Wuhan police’s extraordinarily blue-washed propaganda site (via machine translation), “Mr. Chen repeatedly gave the police officers handling the case a thumbs up: ‘The police officers at Guanshan Police Station are quick to respond to the case, quick to arrest people, and quick to recover losses!’” Mmmmmm.
